The present invention relates, in general, to the field of file systems ("FS") of computer operating systems ("OS"). More particularly, the present invention relates to a single transaction technique for a journaling file system of a computer operating system in which a journal, or log, contains sequences of file system updates grouped into atomic transactions which are committed with a single computer mass storage device write operation.
Modern UNIX.RTM. OS file systems have significantly increased overall computer system availability through the use of "journaling" in which a journal, or log, of file system operations is sequentially scanned at boot time. In this manner, a file system can be brought on-line more quickly than implementing a relatively lengthy check-and-repair step.
Unfortunately, journaling may nevertheless serve to decrease a FS performance in synchronous operations, which type of operations are required for compliance with several operating system standards such as POSIX, SVID and NFS. Synchronous file system operations are ones in which each operation is treated as a separate transaction and each such operation requires at least one write to an associated computer mass storage, or disk drive, per operation. Stated another way, a synchronous file system operation is one in which all data must be written to disk, or the transaction "committed", before returning to a particular application program. As such, synchronous operations can decrease a journaling FS performance by creating a "bottleneck" at the logging device as each synchronous operation writes its transaction into the log.